The problem is that a lot of the Utopia-lite this or that person writes sounds like a Vision of Hell to me, and the writer doesn't seem to have considered, maybe was incapable of considering, just how bad what they wrote really is past surface detail. You take Road to the Sea, at one point they force a town to move 'for their own good' so they don't stagnate. No reason is ever given or implied beyond that they'd dwelt in the same spot too long and that it was unhealthy for them. No threats to others, no implication they had begun preaching xenophobia to their neighbors or engaging in oppression locally, just that they needed to move their town for the sake of avoiding stagnation. Now its been a while so I may have misread or misremembered it, but that was jaw-droppingly immoral to me and a lot of Utopia-lite golden futures are like that, "You have absolute Freedom to do whatever we tell you to do, because 'science'" really bug me.
Its sort of like Star Trek, sounds really good until you inspect Utopia and its clearly 'Gene's Roddenberry's naive view of human behavior which amounts to an oppressive theocracy'. Almost every writer does some of that, Clarke's hardly the worst, but a lot of their 'golden age' descriptions mostly just read to me as "why X has no idea how civilization functions but is sublimely convinced they understand it better than anyone else."
Well I give him a pass on Rama because he co-wrote the sequels, Rendezvous with Rama is rightly a classic, but not for the characters to be sure.
I think you mean Kim Stanley Robinson, he wrote Red Mars, Robin Hobb is the lady who wrote the Farseer Trilogy and some more fantasy, which I am by disturbingly freakish coincidence actually listening to on audiobook right now. I don't mind as much when a writer inserts their own dogma in their work, they all do to some degree, its just less obvious when they're far away from now or if they don't actually break into long-winded rants about it or blatant strawmen. The problem I have with Robinson is that he essentially relates stuff he clearly doesn't understand scientifically as an expert and it really shows and nags at the mind, yet he gets listed as 'very hard Sci-fi'.
I'll have to do that.
Hmmm ok the problem with the moving was that it didn't work...the culture was still stagnated as in they did no work (technology provided them everything they needed so they didn't have to) and they made no discoveries...rather than being utopia lite it was a very very very bad anti-utopia. Shown by when the spacefaring humans came and asked doesn't it excite you to go to space? And the main characters response was what are you crazy? As well as the city that they found being so so so much better and a great example of how much they had fallen. So yes having them move to avoid stagnation is immoral certainly even more so when it didn't work....
In no way would Clark say the people left on earth lived in a utopia very much not so. If you interpreted it that way then yeah I can see how you would take it badly...
I did mean Kim Stanley Robinson yes. From what I know of science and engineering the stuff he talked about made sense, now my training is in biochemistry so my engineering knowledge is limited but I would certainly classify him as very hard sci-fi in that part of his books read like a technical manual. His issues for me came when he moved into socialism and communism. When he basically had the middle eastern character purposely badly make the capitalist argument as a strawman to argue against it I nearly stopped reading. Thankfully the very last book got back to interesting science and character development. I have yet to read any of his other books because the communist claptrap in that one angered me so much. (But then the capitalist manifestio is one of my most treasured books, so I am a little odd for this site I suppose). Larry's politics certainly don't line up with my own...
